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The other day, political commentators Matt Walsh and Mehdi Hasan got into a debate over the importance of slavery in the American founding. Walsh argued that Christianity built this country. Hasan responded that the country was “built by slaves,” a third of them Muslims.
When a person points out that slavery was not only an immense moral drag on the nation but also inhibited economic growth and was vehemently opposed by a significant number of Americans, you will often be accused of whitewashing the practice. When Walsh correctly pointed out that few Americans had slaves, for instance, Hasan accused him of saying, “Hey, slavery wasn’t so bad.”
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This is absurd. There was an immeasurable cost in stripping millions of black people of their agency and humanity. And, of course, in the end, it tore apart the country. What slavery didn’t do was build America. It made everything worse. Pointing this out doesn’t cover up the profound evils of slavery. It accentuates them.
The purpose of revisionist histories like the New York Times’s 1619 Project, still taught in high schools around the country, is to convince a generation of young people that America’s existence, the revolution itself, was a fight not over liberty but to preserve the institution of slavery.
There are numerous debunkings of the 1619 Project, some of the best by socialist historians. But the project’s ahistorical claims comport so well with progressive Democrats’ racialist views on basically everything that it’ll probably congeal as truth in the minds of millions. You already see people reducing the signers of the Declaration of Independence to mere “white slave owners,” which is an easy way to dismiss the aspirational ideas of that generation.
Another reason progressive Democrats like to say slavery built the country is to belittle our economic success.
Socialists often maintain that slavery is intrinsically tied to capitalism, though the former existed for thousands of years in virtually every society before the latter was ever codified. “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation,” Matthew Desmond said in the 1619 Project. Yet it was a free market, in which people created immense wealth by the voluntary exchange of goods and services, engaging in the work of their choice, that freed untold millions from servitude.
Talking about slavery in economic terms is perilous business. Because even if it were profitable and productive, it would still be evil. But economic historians have long argued that slavery was not only immoral but incredibly inefficient. Slavery undermined long-term economic growth and stifled innovation and industrialization. The wealth and industrial capacity of the North far exceeded that of the Old South. Even in rural areas, the average Northerner had a higher per capita income and far better life than a free Southerner. Wealth in the South was concentrated in the hands of a small aristocratic planter class that created little good for those around them.
Adam Smith, a big influence on many of the founders, was a vehement critic of slavery and indentured servitude on both moral and economic grounds. In Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith brands slavery the “vilest of all states.” In Wealth of Nations, he argues that slave labor is the most unproductive and expensive of all labor because it necessitates everything be “squeezed out” of a slave “by violence only.”
Take the Hasan claim that “there are no railroads without slaves.” The Southern railroads were inferior to those made by the North. They had poor construction, lacked interconnection, and were built far more slowly. Most of the great transcontinental railroads were constructed after the Civil War. We may well have better railroads without slavery. We probably would have had them quicker.
But Hasan added another wrinkle to his argument. “One in three of the slaves who built this country were Muslims,” he contended. This assertion rests on extraordinarily flimsy grounds, largely based on the areas where slaves originated. Evidence of Islamic traditions being practiced by large numbers of slaves, or anyone else in early America, is tenuous, at best. And, anyway, how many people would contend that the Ottoman Empire, which was teeming with slaves from the Balkans and Slavic areas and far more reliant on them than the United States, was built by Christians?
Indeed, it might come as a shock to a lot of progressive Democrats that the greatest slave trading empire in history was run by Arabs. It was the abolitionist British, spurred by a Christian awakening, that finally moved to stop slavery in their own dominion and then the entire slave trade, which was a feature of the Islamic world from Muhammad into the 20th century. Islamic traders were still at it after Americans had fought a bloody war to free their own slaves — a unique event in history. The last Islamic nations banned slavery in the early 1980s. But let’s face it, it hasn’t been stamped out yet.
Still, Hasan told Walsh that Muslims “were here long before the Walsh family arrived.” You see the sleight of hand, right? Hasan placed himself in a continuum reaching back to the first Muslim slaves of the 1600s, but the Walshes, as individuals, were disconnected from the Christian or British in early America. Of course, no one with even a passing familiarity with our history believes that Muslims built this country. Protestants, largely Anglo-Saxons, built this country. Too many of them used slaves.
But in the most vital sense, the Walshes of the world had far more to do with the nation’s founding than the Hasans or the Harsanyis. We function under their ideas. That doesn’t necessarily make the Walshes better citizens today. We all share the same legacy, and when we assimilate, we should embrace the same set of governing values and societal norms. Those who came later may have improved American life in numerous ways, but all successful newcomers internalized the customs created by the British, Germans, and Dutch.
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One thing the founders, products of the Enlightenment, did not do was incorporate Islamic ideas into their thinking, nor were they theocrats, as some social conservatives would have it. They created governance and protected rights that were based on classical European and Western tradition. Those ideas were hatched or coalesced in a Christian world.
And there lies the problem for Mehdi Hasan and other critics of American tradition. They don’t like this very much. So, they revise history to suit their needs.